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OCTOBER 2014 QUICKBOOKS DESKTOP NEWSLETTER

Billing for Time in QuickBooks: An Overview

If you sell your employees' time and skills, you can use QuickBooks to record those hours and billyour customers for them. If your small business sells products, you know how precisely you must track your starting stocknumbers, ongoing inventory levels, and your reorder points. QuickBooks provides tools to helpwith this process, but human factors can sometimes throw off your careful counts. Fortunately, QuickBooks is remarkably flexible when it comes to recording the time youremployees spend on customers and jobs. You can enter information about a single activity -- eitherbillable or unbillable -- and/or document hours in a timesheet. A built-in timer (the "Stopwatch")helps you count the minutes automatically; you can also type them in manually. One Work Session All versions of desktop QuickBooks include dialog boxes designed to help you enter all the detailsrelated to a single timed activity. To get there, either open the Employees menu and select EnterTime | Time/Enter Single Activity, or click the down arrow next to the Enter Time icon on theHome Page and choose Time/Enter Single Activity.

Figure 1: QuickBooks helps you create records for individual activities completed by employees, which can be eitherbillable or unbillable.

You fill out the fields in this window like you would any other in QuickBooks. Click the calendaricon in the DATE field to reflect the date the work was completed (not the current date), and clickthe down arrows in the fields that contain them to select options from a list. If you already knowthe duration of the activity, simply enter it in the field to the right of the clock icon. Otherwise, usethe Start, Stop, and Pause buttons to let QuickBooks time it. The Time/Enter Single Activity dialog box is designed to record one activity, not necessarily anentire workday, unless an employee only provides one service for one customer in a day. If he orshe provides more than one service for one or more customers, you'll need a fresh record foreach. Note: If the employee selected is timesheet-based, an additional field will appear above the CLASSfield asking for the related PAYROLL ITEM. And if you've turned on workers' compensation (and theemployee is timesheet-based), a field titled WC CODE will drop into place below it. This must bedone absolutely correctly, and it can get complicated. We can help you manage this feature. A Comprehensive View At the top of the Time/Enter Single Activity dialog box, you'll see an icon labeled Timesheet. If youclick on this with an employee's name selected, his or her timesheet will open and display thehours already entered for that period. Or you can open a blank timesheet by opening theEmployees menu and selecting Enter Time | Use Weekly Timesheet. You can also click the EnterTime icon on the Home Page.

Figure 2: You can access an employee's timesheet from the Time/Enter Single Activity dialog box, from the Employeesmenu, or from the Home Page.

If you've entered all of the hours individually for an employee in a given time period, the timesheetshould be correct when you click through from the Time/Enter Single Activity box. If not, you canedit cells by clicking in them and changing the data. Be sure that the Billable box is checked orunchecked correctly.

You can also enter hours directly on a timesheet instead of recording individual activities. Justselect the employee's name by clicking on the arrow in the NAME field at the top of the WeeklyTimesheet dialog box and fill in the boxes. Note: Individual activities that you enter for employees are automatically transferred to thetimesheet format and vice-versa. Billing for Time QuickBooks keeps track of all entered billable hours and reminds you of them when it's time toinvoice. If customers have outstanding time and/or costs, this dialog box will open the next timeyou start to create an invoice for them:

Figure 3: This dialog box is one of the ways QuickBooks helps you bill customers for everything they owe.

QuickBooks also provides several reports related to billing for time. We'll be happy to go overthem and -- as always -- help with any other questions you might have.

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